@calvin did they evenshow stuff like this this on American TV or was it made for internal use at sales conferences etc?

From what I vaguely remember of these they would only be affordable to a medium size business as a large capital investment, and folk who make such decisions tend not to be swayed by cheesy pop rap videos (even if it *was* the 1990s!)

@calvin@coryw that sort of makes sense by US marketing standards. From memory outside of unis and specialist tech businesses Unix workstations weren't that much a thing in UK, the only company I worked for which tried using them (in that case Sun) to replace IBM mainframes running COBOL/CICS failed badly and the h/w was later sold off quite cheap (but only full on techs/Unix heads were able to get it working and by that time commodity priced PC's were common)

@vfrmedia@calvin RE UNIX in that company, workstations were often sold as accompaniments and dev/test systems for big servers, and Sun was trying Very Hard™ to get into the enterprise "money counting machines" market, and a big advantage they cited was giving devs/admins the same hardware the servers were on. Not strictly necessary with SSH, but still nice, especially before virtualization on non-IBM stuff was common.

@coryw@calvin that would explain exactly what my former employers were trying to do; but the incoming data sets were in a mess anyway and errors between them and the paper files so the project was abandoned in mid 90s. They were still using the IBM system (maybe with more screenscraping of the 3270 emulator) in the mid 2000s, thats what the last staff told me just before all the admin work got bangalored..